"1,800 Percent Increase from 14 Million Pages in 1998"
"N2H2's database contained 14 million identified pages of pornography
in 1998, so the growth to 260 million represents an almost 20-fold
increase in just five years"
"There have been recent filtering software studies by eTesting Labs
for the Department of Justice and a peer-reviewed study conducted by
the Kaiser Family Foundation and published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association (JAMA). Both found N2H2 superior to
competitors at blocking pornographic Internet content without unduly
blocking appropriate content, even in related areas such as breast
cancer or sexually transmitted diseases."

This censorware PR is going around the world, from
Australia
to Japan
.

There is absolutely no support for me to rebut it, in terms
of 1) pay, 2) press-power, 3) protection (from lawsuits). I can start
shouting to the wind and risking a lawsuit ... or not.

First, just on the face of it, how much has the web itself grown since
1998? Certainly much ("1,800 percent"?) If the number of "porn"-pages
simply remained a constant fraction overall, it would increase in absolute
numbers as the web itself grows. What methodology was used to derive
that number of "identified pages of pornography" anyway?

And here's where things get interesting. I know N2H2 has to be
playing fast and loose (if anyone doubted just based on general principles),
because I know their blacklist does not have 260 million entries,
and could not have had 14 million entries in 1998. But
I can't publish that in any way that is objectively provable in terms of
peer-review, because that would require conveying decryption information.
And no organization is backing me as a researcher to give my mere
words weight in terms of that "name" reputation-capital.

Moreover, I could point out many, many, flaws in that slippery phrase
"classified as pornography". In practice, nobody outside of a few
hundred hard-core readers (pun unintended) would hear. So, the upside is
zero for me, little in general, and the downside is years of litigation.
It's not worth it.

[To be continued in further posts. Next planned: Background historical
material regarding censorware companies, lying with statistics, attack
and defense]